Bla...

On Thursday I was at the library checking out the Viking Portable Jung. I had been reading something else on the internet and it was making references to archetypal characters identified in Jung's writing and I got interested. I thought it might help me figure myself out a little. Anyway, while I was scanning the shelves around it a children's book caught my eye. It seemed a little out of place in the psychology section. So I picked it up and began reading it.

It was titled something like "Let's Make Some Friends!" At once I began to mentally criticise it. It was like so much other self help literature that I don't trust. "Follow our proven program to happiness..." But I continued to flip through it. One of it's first admonitions was that if we were going to make friends then we had to like ourselves. Why would we ask someone else to like someone we didn't, even if that person was our self? It was an interesting question; one to which I've struggled to find the answer for years. I'm still looking.

Anyway, as the solution to the problem of self-esteem, the book suggested sitting down and making a list of everything that we did well. The illustrations on the page showed a little black kid with a curly hair sitting at a school desk scribbling on a piece of paper with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration.

From there the book went on, but I was kind of stuck there. How did the boy determine what he did well? What did "well" mean? By what standard was he measuring himself? To whom was he comparing himself to determine his worth? Could it be arbitrary? I am the best at brushing my teeth the way that I brush them, but I am horrible at brushing them the way the dentist wishes I would.

When I was a young boy I compared myself to members of my family. If I was better than Peter at something then I was thrilled and exhilarated. I knew I was good, but I was scared too, because it upset the natural order of things. Later on I compared myself to my classmates. I was all about being better than them at the things I wanted to be good at. There were a lot of problems with that standard too, the least of which was that I kept running up against the fact that no matter how good I became at anything that you'd turn over a rock and find someone else that did it twice as good without even trying.

At that point being the best at anything started to become meaningless to me. I couldn't compare myself to anyone and try to be better. I tried to go by the standard of pleasing myself with my efforts for a while. I guess it didn't stick, or I lost it along the way somehow. Obviously it didn't make enough sense to me to try to really run with it.

My mission changed things a lot. I got stuck on the idea of justification. I just wanted to be good enough, to be a good enough person to please God. I didn't ever feel so good about how I was doing though because of that whole "Be ye therefore perfect," thing. I know everyone who reads this is going to think, "But that's what mercy is for, because no one can live by that standard at this stage of life". Sadly, mercy doesn't make sense to me. I kind of get it intellectually, but it's like most math to me. I can see how to do it how to do it sometimes and why to do it, but it doesn't make much of an impression on my mind, and I resist it. That analogy doesn't work all of the way, but hopefully enough that those among readers will remember having tried to explain math concepts to me and get it. If you've stumbled here accidentally and are reading incidentally them mazal tov, welcome to my life.

Anyway, bla bla bla. So, the standard was perfection, I wanted justification, I don't deal well with the concept of mercy, and I didn't go anywhere for a lot of years with that. Somewhat recently I got tired of trying to be anything and kind of gave up. So all of this leads to Friday.

Mark invited me to go to an International Dinner with his ward. I was picturing going eating some food and going back to his place to do something else. We made some Thai peanutbutter grilled chicken. Somewhere along the way Mark was talking about going on a date with a girl the other night. I asked how he felt about her and he just kind of shrugged. He said he should have known because it was almost a year between when he asked her out the first time and took her out again the second time. He said he just couldn't feel that interested and that he had tried. I asked you could ever really honestly make yourself feel anything by trying. He replied you probably could not but then said maybe just by force of will. I didn't tell him I disagreed. That's why I stopped trying to date about a year ago.

I felt weird pretty much from the moment that I walked in. I haven't really been to any church activities at all for a while and I just felt a bad feeling being there. I felt really uncomfortable, but I tried not to let it get to me. Mark wandered around talking to girls and I sat at a table surrounded by people I'd met incidentally but didn't feel like I could talk to. The children's book was in my mind. So was Dad's comment to me the other day that he thought that my discomfort when I went to church wasn't with church but transference of my own feelings about myself. I tried to think of things to say to people, and tried not to feel as bad as I was beginning to feel.

I couldn't tell Mark outright that I wanted to leave and get on with the evening, but I tried to let him know. Then someone found a basketball and my heart sank. Half an hour later I was sitting alone, and a bunch of guys were alpha-maleing. Mark asked me if I wanted to play and I told him that I felt like I was flashing back back to p-day's from my mission. He didn't get it. In that moment I was feeling about as depressed as I tried not to realize I felt most of the time on my mission. It was a trapped feeling. After a while I realized that I wasn't on my mission and asked Mark if he could find a ride home, and I left. I was really miserable as I drove home. I went immediately to bed even though it wasn't quite nine yet. I had to get away from feeling as bad as I felt.

So it's Sunday night, and I'm realizing why this was all so disturbing to me. Mike Forsberg lost his job at the DA's office last week and is probably moving back to Cache Valley, and Mark is going to be moving to Provo again to work as a law clerk. Summer is coming and I won't have school to distract me. I see another crack up on the horizon.

Anyway, in the grand tradition of Mike-ness this is all pretty pathetic, and I'm tired of it myself. As sang Billy Joel, "The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems." I'm sure things will be fine. It just won't seem like it, but that's probably just because I'm me.